Blogs Outrank Social Networks In Influence

Social Media Insights is a daily
newsletter from Business
Insider that collects and delivers the top social
media news first thing every morning. You can sign up
to receive Social Media Insightshere
or at the bottom of this post.

The report found that blogs are now the third-most influential
digital resource (31 percent) when making overall purchases,
behind retail sites (56 percent) and brand sites (34 percent).
Read >>

TV Analogies: Twitter Is Live, Facebook Is DVR (Search Engine
Land)
When you follow someone on Twitter,
you see everything they post. When you follow someone on
Facebook,
it decides what you see. Which is right? Probably both, and it
comes down to the live TV versus DVR personalities of each
service. When you follow accounts on Twitter, everything they
post flows into your Twitter timeline. You’re going to see it
all. Twitter’s not sitting behind the scenes trying to decide
what non-paid tweets it thinks are more important and should be
shown nor what should be held back. In contrast to Twitter,
Facebook acts more like a DVR. Yes, you can view your Facebook
news feed and see things appearing in a timely manner. But
Facebook also does what Twitter does not. It effectively records
your social media for you. Some items shown may be hours old.
Read >>

The Six Stages Of Social Business Transformation (Altimeter
Group via LinkedIn)
In business, social media is becoming a lot like email: every
company has it. But, unlike email, organizations haven’t mastered
how to effectively communicate through the likes of Facebook or
the tweets of Twitter. Here's how they transform:

It takes a change agent to guide development in a way that
delivers value to stakeholders.
Read >>

The Problems Brands Have Working With Influencers (readwrite
social)
Advertising used to be easy. Social media has changed that
forever. Part of this complexity manifests itself in the
difficulty of tracking down those who can spread a brand's
message effectively. And once you've identified the influencers,
you still have to get them to play ball. That's when the real
disconnect between brands and influencers becomes apparent:

Problem 1: Getting Noticed

Problem 2: Influence Is A Closely Guarded
Position

Problem 3: Brands Are Brands

It's a question of balance – brands can't expect to have every
little thing tweaked to their satisfaction in a non-traditional
advertising environment.
Read >>

We know a lot about this person. They own a dog. They take it for
walks and visit the dog park. He's in the market for a new dog
leash, and presently he could use some empathy to sooth his
frustration. It's this profile of a consumer that allows the
brands to intelligently engage this person in social media by
tweeting to them or targeting hyper-relevant Facebook ads to them
in real-time.
Read >>

How To Make Space For Social Media (Harvard Business
Review)
Few professionals were sitting at their desks in 2004, eyeing the
empty slots in their calendars and wishing that somebody would
just invent a new way of communicating to fill those long and
lonely minutes. People's calendars were already full. Social
media demanded attention. It had to be put into the rotation, but
that doesn't mean we took something else off our calendars to
accommodate it. Instead we just added it to the marketing teams'
tasks, challenging them to figure it out until they could make a
business case for hiring full-time social media staffers. Flash
forward a decade, and any organization with serious social media
ambitions has those full-time staffers. They've expanded teams
and reassigned resources by eliminating now-deprecated
communications channels.
Read >>